ATTENTION TURNS now from methodology to issues. It was their contributions to the question of ‘origins’ that drew the brothers’ historical works into scholarly debates. John’s treatment of the ‘Aryan origins’ question and William’s of the Prophet’s role in the origins of Islam, together with their evaluations of Vedic and Islamic ‘civilizations’, allow some assessment of their significance in mid-nineteenth-century debates on identities, comparative religion and the meanings of ‘civilization’. Apart from giving some insight into their mindsets on some contemporary issues of great import among European scholars, the discussion in William’s case provides the context for understanding why the publication of his Life of Mahomet was to trigger the concern that it eventually did among Indian Muslims.

Aryan origins, language and race

John’s contribution to the subject of Aryan origins took place just as the debate was intensifying in the 1850s, a period of seemingly quiet scholarly digestion in Indological circles having followed the initial establishment of linguistic affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and other European languages by William Jones and H. T. Colebrooke from 1786 to the 1820s. Meanwhile in Europe the researches of Franz Bopp, Rasmus Ras, Jakob Grimm, the Schlegel brothers and a host of other, mainly German, philologists were refining the basic findings on linguistic affinities. John may have been aware of these advances in philology even before departing for India in the late 1820s. While he was at Haileybury, Dugald Stewart, professor of philosophy at Edinburgh had controversially proposed that Sanskrit was a Brahmin hoax based on Greek. Alexander Hamilton’s professorship of Hindu literature and Asian history at Haileybury in the years just before John’s enrolment may have provoked discussions of these linguistic debates among his successors that then percolated into the classrooms.

Yet the ‘origins’ issue came to the fore controversially and publicly in Britain only in the late 1840s following Friedrich Max Müller’s first lecture in Britain on the relations between Bengali and Sanskrit in which, in addition to outlining the processes of Aryan migration, based on the findings of philology, he justified the comparative study of languages for their three-fold ‘historical, practical, and philosophical’ advantages.